The Mabel Mercer Foundation—which is dedicated to preserving and performing the art of cabaret—tonight is celebrating two milestones: its 40th anniversary and the 125th year of its namesake, the legendary singer, Mabel Mercer.
Singer Mabel Mercer performing at a nightclub. (Photo by Arthur Schatz/Getty Images)
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The celebration will include a party and concert at 54 Below, the Broadway supper club in Manhattan. The party is sold out, but the concert will be livestreamed at 6:45 p.m. ET, with tickets available for $29.
Artists performing will include those supported by Donald Smith, who established the foundation, and others who knew Mercer personally. They will include Carole J. Bufford, Natalie Douglas, Bryan Eng, Jeff Harnar, Karen Mason, Madalynn Mathews, MOIPEI (Mary, Maggy, and Marta), Lee Roy Reams, Steve Ross, Craig Rubano and KT Sullivan, the foundation’s artistic director. They will be accompanied by Jon Weber on piano and Steve Doyle on bass.
The non-profit Mabel Mercer Foundation’s activities include serving as a central source of information for artists, presenters, promoters and the general public; sponsoring performances and broadcasts by new and established singers and entertainers; and presenting the annual New York Cabaret Convention at Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.
The foundation’s outreach beyond New York includes partnerships in the Cayman Islands and Durango, Colorado.
The foundation also offers a number of educational programs, including a 12-week cabaret workshop led by its education director, Natalie Douglas, at the Professional Performing Arts High School in Manhattan; teen cabaret showcases (the next is scheduled to take place in January 2026); and an American songbook competition, meant, the foundation said, “to inspire young performers to explore and celebrate the Great American Songbook,” with three prizes ranging from $1,000 to $2,500.
According to the foundation, Mabel Mercer “helped shape the American songbook and inspired iconic artists like Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Tony Bennett.”
It also called the American songbook ”one of our national treasures. Thus, the art of cabaret is a gateway to an eternal appreciation of such geniuses as George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, E. Y. Harburg, Burton Lane, Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, Frank Loesser, Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Jule Styne, Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim, among many others. That American popular music and cabaret should — and must — thrive is the avowed declaration and dedication of the Mabel Mercer Foundation. As such, (its) efforts continue on a daily basis to promote the traditions so eloquently and unforgettably exemplified by Mabel Mercer, arguably the supreme cabaret artist of the twentieth century.”
In an interview this week with Forbes.com, Sullivan said Mercer wasn’t “just singing songs, just hitting notes. They are stories. I’ve noticed young people who are used to pop songs, when they get into the stories, they love it and they want to do more of them. That’s great.”
Sullivan has appeared in every New York Cabaret Convention since the inaugural event in 1989, and has performed at the Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel and at the Neue Galerie’s Café Sabarsky, both in New York, as well as at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., the London cabaret Crazy Coqs and many music festivals worldwide.
